Pendar Technologies, LLC SBIR Phase I Award, October 2018

Since the demonstration of the first quantum cascade laser (QCL) in 1994, there has been a steady improvement of the demonstrated power level and wall-plug efficiency. As expected for most maturing technologies, this rate of progress has slowed down as the parameter space of novel ideas has been more fully explored. R&D efforts however have not yet focused specifically on the thermal impedance of QCLs. Pendar will leverage years of experience designing, fabricating and testing high power QCLs to significantly reduce the thermal impedance and heat generation of these devices while achieving 5 watt output power and maintaining excellent beam quality.